Email open rates can make or break your business. You can equate this measure of viewership to something more common like ratings for a TV show: the lower the ratings, the higher the chances of the show being cancelled after a few seasons or less. Obviously, after that kind of an episode, you can't imagine the director or producer of the show being the toast of the town and their professional credibility will also take a tumble. This is exactly the same thing that will happen to an online marketer as well if steps are not taken to improve email open rates quickly as soon as they are disclosed. If you are an online entity that is a retail front for offline producers, not attending to falling viewership figures will cause your suppliers to desert you and worse still, your funding could even be cut off because the very reason that you are online in the first place is in question. Therefore, it is important that you understand how the mechanism itself works and its limitations. This will aid you to make a case against low rates should the issue ever come up and also to rectify the problem.



Email open rates are measured by embedding a tag in a mailer with a function to call an image on a server when opened. When this call occurs it is registered as an open hit. What can ruin this process is a spam filter, email client settings, user boredom with mailers, and malpractices like spamming. Spam filters are notoriously efficient at weeding out spam mail and other mails that are unsolicited. They use complex algorithms to analyze mails sent from unknown sources to categorize mails as spam. Getting your mailers caught in a spam filter can also cause your business to be categorized as a spamming entity. Therefore, you have to fix this problem first before you think of ways to improve email open rates itself.

Email client settings are varied. Some may have previews enabled with full access to servers to down images in a preview itself. Others may have settings that block the download of images until the user specifically intervenes to download them. These vagaries need to be factored in to your rate statistics.

Users will bother to click and open mails that have typical spam subject lines, hard sell lines, and misleading information in the subject line. It is quite incredible how something as small as a subject line can affect email open rates.

Finally, if you are serious about trying to improve email open rates, acquire your addresses sensibly and don't use the mailing methods used by spammers like buying addresses in CDs or off the web, using open relays, spider software, or bots. These are all methods that are frowned upon by governments worldwide. Besides, the chances of a customer bothering with your mails if he doesn't know are slim and this will affect the figures of your email open rates.